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A fun ballistic for a special treat

I'm a huge fan of Lush, the natural cosmetics store, and try and get hold of every product they produce. To celebrate the Royal Wedding earlier this year, they brought back a bath ballistic from many years ago - the Street Party ballistic.

***What is Lush?***

Lush is a store that makes toiletries and cosmetics, using natural and organic ingredients where possible and minimising packaging where they can. It started out as a mail order company called Cosmetics to Go, but this failed and the new store, Lush, opened in Poole, Dorset. Later branches of the shop opened in London and beyond, and there are now Lush stores all over the world. As well as in store, you can also buy products from the website, www.lush.co.uk. There are similar websites for many different countries including the USA, Japan and Germany.

Lush buy ingredients only from companies that do not test on animals. All of their products are suitable for vegetarians and many are suitable for vegans.

Lush say: "We believe in happy people making happy soap, putting our faces on our products and making our mums proud."We believe in long candlelit baths, sharing showers, massage, filling the world with perfume and in the right to make mistakes, lose everything and start again."

***What's a bath ballistic?***

A ballistic is a bath bomb that you drop into a previously run bath - it will dissolve, fizzing away while releasing colour, scent and essential oils into the bath. Ballistics don't produce bubbles, but are an entirely different bathing experience.

This particular ballistic, suitable for vegans and priced at £2.95, has a herbal citrus scent of lavender and litsea cubeba (I have no idea what this is). It also contains confetti hearts and tons and tons of glitter! The ballistic has a little flag sticking out of the top - according to the picture on Dooyoo this used to be a Canadian flag, but now, naturally enough, it's a Union Jack.

***My Experience***

When I first bought this bath ballistic, I could smell the lovely strong citrus scent and it made my bag smell lovely! I took it home and used it around the time of the bank holiday weekend.

As with all ballistics, I ran the bath first then got in so I could watch the ballistic fizz. After dropping it in, I was pleased to see that it fizzed very dramatically and dispersed the glitter and the confetti thoroughly around the bath. The delicious citrus aroma wafted into the air and was really refreshing and reviving.

The water didn't change colour, but I didn't expect it to seeing as the ballistic was white, and in any case the glitter certainly made up for it. There was tons of the stuff - red, blue and silver, presumably to represent the Union Jack (I pulled the little flag out of the water and left it on the side). The heart shaped confetti was pretty too, and altogether the bath looked absolutely lovely.

I remained in the bath for a while, enjoying my book and the smell surrounding me. Eventually, I got out and pulled the plug. Though there was loads of glitter in the bath, it was easy enough to remove this by turning the shower on and directing the hose at it.

While it was easy enough to remove the glitter on the bath, it wasn't so easy to remove it from me! It stuck to my skin and went absolutely everywhere - on my towel, pyjamas, clothes... I was covered in the stuff! I had to go to work after the weekend covered in glitter - at least it brightened up my day! It took a couple of days to remove the bulk of the glitter, and at least a week to remove the remnants which were still hanging around. Luckily the glitter didn't irritate my skin, which felt quite soft after my bath although I did need to apply moisturiser.

I did enjoy using Street Party, which smelled lovely and looked very pretty, but I have to deduct one star for the sheer amount of glitter which got absolutely everywhere!